Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound in the Diagnosis of Ocular Pathology: Application Prospects

Abstract

Contrast-enhanced ultrasound is a highly informative method for the differential diagnosis of focal changes in various organs and tissues, which allows to visualize vascular structures and obtain new previously unavailable information when using standard b-scan. At the beginning of the 21st century after the development of a new generation of contrast agents consisting of microbubbles with inert gas contrast-enhanced ultrasound became widely used to improve visual assessment of small-caliber vessels in the diagnosis of the abdominal cavity and retroperitoneal space pathology: benign and malignant liver formations, spleen pathology, inflammatory diseases and tumors of the pancreas, defects in renal perfusion, tumor and cystic lesions of the kidneys. Assessment of intraocular tumors microcirculation and diagnosis of vitreoretinal pathology are still two main directions of using contrast-enhanced ultrasound in ophthalmology. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of contrast-enhanced ultrasound in the study of perfusion of different types of uveal melanoma in an animal experiment. A promising direction in the field of genetic engineering is the use of local contrast-enhanced ultrasound exposure on retinal cells (retinal ganglion cells, retinal pigment epithelium) to promote gene transfection (non-viral nucleic acid delivery into the DNA of a cell), which is an important part of gene therapy. Despite the successes achieved in the study of contrast-enhanced ultrasound effectiveness in medicine, further research is needed to increase the informative value of this method in the diagnosis of ophthalmopathology.

Keywords

• contrast-enhanced ultrasound
• ultrasound of the eye
• microcirculation
• microbubbles
• uveal melanoma